Lessons from an autobiography

Every now and then, I get the desire to write down some part of my personal history. This time, it was from my early adulthood.

I spent several days, off and on, writing out and researching memories. I started with what I recall now, and then I looked up old emails.

I have always kept most of my old emails. I can access the ones that are from after 2004, which must have been when web mail programs stopped limiting space. I probably have even more saved somewhere, because I used to copy and paste them into long documents and save them. But likely they are on floppy disc or CD and not easily accessible.

I won’t post what I wrote, because it also involves other people.  The only way I would consider sharing it is in person, on paper, with no recording devices in the room. But I enjoyed the process and I think it was helpful.  Some insights I have:

1) Memory is a story, not a recording. Even the act of recalling requires putting a filter into what is recalled. What I mean is, I always remember with a purpose and then I specifically remember what seems to address that purpose. But as I actually read some of the old emails, I started to remember things that were omitted by the filter. There’s a lot more to my life than the story I tell myself.

2) I feel like my self and identity is pretty consistent over time, but reading old emails challenges that idea. Many times I would read over points I was trying to make in the emails and wonder: “What on earth was I thinking?” “What could have been motivating me to say that?” It was as much like trying to understand a character in a book as it was like recalling the details of an event.

This was especially revelatory as part of my motivation was to compare my memories with an account I read by someone I knew at roughly the same time in our lives. I read their account thinking: “They have definitely left things out.” Well, my memory also left things out! 

3) We’ve all heard sayings like “just be yourself” “think outside the box” etc, etc. It’s cliche.  But really, we should actually try our best to think for ourselves and come to conclusions based on real experiences. It’s much more interesting reading about that than reading an account of how you once read something and decided to believe it.

4) I have some memories that can make me laugh out loud, twenty years later or almost that. It makes me happy.

5) I experienced a lot of uncertainty in my twenties about my direction in life. Plans had to be abandoned and modified. Disappointment was frequent. One thing that I think I did right, however, was engaging with small clubs and loosely organized activities that exposed me to different people and their ways of getting along and getting things done. These included volunteer jobs, ballroom dancing and step dancing, concert band, and my various employers. I was always “distributed” in the people I relied on. I am very grateful for this, and grateful for the many functional groups and systems in my current life (whatever their flaws). It’s a reminder never to underestimate the power of small systems and networks.

Quotations from Vacation

"What if we saw attention in the same way we see air or water: As a valuable resource that we hold in common?"

Matthew B. Crawford, quoted by Ruth Gaskovski in You Are Who You Meet: A Geography of Common Ground (July 16th)

"Walking now amidst silence and spaciousness, I became absorbed in the landscape and was consciously grateful that I lived in a country where undisturbed engagement with the natural world is possible. It is something I have never taken for granted."

Dougie Strang, The Bone Cave, page 75.

"How would it be to live a balanced life, filled with meaning and ceremony, in a place where you were from and where your culture's stories told you that you had always been from - and then to be severed from that?"

Dougie Strang, The Bone Cave, page 39

"If, in response to whatever image the world throws at us, we look at our hearts, we can see instantly if peace dwells there, or something else: anger, rage, righteousness, distraction, even joy. If it is not peace, then something, or someone, is leading us astray."

Paul Kingsnorth, All the World is Myth (July 15th 2024)

"A'Mhoine is deemed ideal for a spaceport because of its "emptiness" and lack of light pollution. Lying in my tent in the dark, I thought about the difference between "empty" and "absent," about the loss of settlements and homes that the Moine Path once linked, and about how loss is carried forward, is inter-generational, like a weight on the cultural consciousness, pressing down whether acknowledged or not." 

Dougie Strang, The Bone Cave, page 108

"In space, a black hole has an "event horizon," which is the point at which nothing, not even light, can escape the pull of gravity. There are similar horizons in ordinary life, edgelands of new experience that can pull us out of our habitual orbits with irresistible gravity, and plunge us into areas that we never knew existed."

Peco Gaskovski, The Event Horizon: Lessons from Anatomy and Hiking Shoes (July 20th 2024)

"There's a notion that stories are eternally present in the landscape, that Diarmid is always hunting the boar on the hill, that a roe deer fawn is always slipping into the birch wood and finding Hamish Henderson asleep there."

Dougie Strang, The Bone Cave, page 118

"We go to the woods because we must. No cathedrals without towering trunks, no books without trees, no crops without clouds, which are the outbreath of forests. We go to the green to remember what community really is, how interdependence underpins all life, to see through the myth of the lone protagonist once and for all."

Caroline Ross, A Walk that Never Ends (July 22nd 2024)

"My heart is like a paved street, covered by asphalt-shaped wounds and such. But the potholes that appear allow the earth of my soul to breathe and flowers to spring forth, ever-renewing."

Fr. Stephen, What to Do When God is Everywhere (July 29th 2024)

Very alternative lifestyles

I am mostly thinking about creative projects these days, but the hot temperatures in the past week have meant more sleepless nights and podcasts, so I have one more controversial topic.

Last night I listened to 

an interview with self-declared pronatalists Malcolm and Simone Collins. The link takes you to the description, so I won’t bother with introducing them.

These were my 3 main takeaways:

1) Many times throughout the podcast, I decided that Malcolm and Simone were batshit crazy and that I would never listen to anything else they had to say again. But then one of them would say something interesting or perceptive and I would find myself intrigued or starting to like them.

2) They happily described their lifestyle as weird and admitted that it is part of their parenting approach to teach their kids to be weird. The children are different because more is expected of them than of other people. If nothing else, this sparked recognition in me: My family growing up was also more than a little bit weird and I also learned to accept it and even take a certain amount of pride in it.*

3) At the end of the interview, Malcolm says that his and Simone’s approach to family life is based on a hypothesis, and if they are wrong, they want other people to be right. He emphasizes that he wants other people to take a different approach to family life and to share whether it works. This improved my opinion of them and their sanity. It’s so rare to find people who are humble, especially when they are claiming to solve the world’s problems (of course this is a hubristic claim in and of itself).

* I do have a complex relationship with weirdness. These days there are so many labels, and everybody is busy “identifying” as this or self-diagnosing as that. That was not my experience growing up: I was just weird. I knew it; other people knew it. (The polite people told me I was “creative.”) So when Malcolm and Simone described themselves (accurately) as weird it was bracing and even gave me a pleasant feeling of nostalgia.

On the other hand, as a young person (teens to early twenties) I felt a great deal of shame over the weirdness. There were a couple of main reasons for this. One, I didn’t feel like I was given a choice as to how weird to be.  I suppose if you have a choice it isn’t genuine weirdness, but play acting. But I still wanted the skills to not be very weird if I chose, and as soon as I figured out how to get them I set about doing so.

The second problem is that the kind of weirdness I experienced as a child, even when it had arguable benefits, didn’t seem to scale up. It worked in our family but I couldn’t see a workable model for a weird life in the larger community. And I wanted that life. I experienced enough isolation as a child to know that I had to find resilience and connection.

But there is always an ambivalence here because I don’t actually mind being weird; I like other weird people; and overwhelmingly, they like me.

I also have, perhaps, a higher than average openness to ideas outside the respectable norm. In real life, I pass  as a middle-class progressive professional. (All those years learning how to be normal!) I say that only to give a shorthand of what’s considered respectable opinion most of the time among friends and colleagues. However, I don’t necessarily accept that the things that most people believe are correct (which nowadays is just as or more likely to be meme- or trend- influenced than the product of experience, tradition, and/or careful thought.) Every now and then, fringe ideas are correct. Not the majority of the time, perhaps, but it’s a non- zero chance.

In other words, part of me, while I quietly go about my conventional, enjoyable existence, is wondering when it is time to abandon it and fully embrace weirdness. I know I can do it after all: it’s a question of whether I want to and whether it’s the best choice. I give the weird people some attention because I think they are in many ways more perceptive in certain circumstances, than my comfortable, conforming peers.

For now, we proceed as normal with occasional adjustments. Next time, something completely different. (Maybe.)

Just Maybe

I always hear “Just Maybe” in Cookie Rankin’s voice.

Anyway. I wrote a while ago about how I don’t call myself a feminist anymore. I say that not being completely confident I ever did call myself a feminist in the first place. However it certainly was part of the environment I came of age in. So the beliefs and assumptions are all there in my awareness, able to be acknowledged and interrogated.

Sometimes I read something that does so in a usefully provocative way. After some years of reading mostly male writers, I seem to be finding interesting female writers as well.  Mary Harrington is probably the one I read the most lately, as well as Caroline Ross, Freya India and Ruth Gaskovski. But there are others too, and this piece by Emily Hancock was enjoyable and thought provoking today.

Femina Machina

I try not to over-focus on whether I’m a This or a That, or whether I’ve found a Way of Thinking that Explains Everything. I find such stances annoying, as in they annoy me in other people and sooner or later they annoy me even more in myself. But, I always have one ear open (two as often as I can spare them) for anything that will help me explain certain thorny matters to my daughters.

Mary Harrington calls herself a “reactionary feminist” and I’m not sure what if anything Emily Hancock calls herself. Anyway I’m not seeking another label. But if there is a kind of feminist who explores how to be a fully embodied being, how to find self-awareness elsewhere than consumerism, who can be ruthlessly honest, well maybe I could be that kind of feminist. Just maybe.

Edit: I have to add this quote from another of Emily’s essays:

“I don’t want to be a foremother who passes down a legacy of avoidance and disembodiment, I want to be a foremother whose legacy is one of facing hard things head-on, roaring reclamation, and tenderness for our innate female qualities and experiences.” 

—An Ungovernable Pain

Flora

I think I learned to crochet around age eight or nine, and since then I’ve gone through periods of crocheting a lot or not doing it at all. It’s something I know well enough that I don’t have to focus energy on how to do it; the skills and knowledge I have just flow outward through the intention and physical motions. It feels like a kind of superpower.

People ask me if it’s hard: not usually, but words like that don’t really apply. They ask me if it’s hard to learn and I say adults tend to over-intellectualize things. The basics are not complicated and for most projects all you need to know is a couple of different stitches (often only one) and how to read and count. The rest is muscle memory and learning how yarn and crocheted fabrics feel in your hands: what feels right, what needs adjusting. I’ve seen people try to learn to crochet and get frustrated because they can’t do what I do after a couple of hours. Well, it’s not the kind of thing you learn with your brain in an afternoon, especially if you have little experience with handiwork. You need to give it time and attention. (Ah there’s the real challenge.)

I say this like I have some kind of superior knowledge. Of course I don’t, at least outside of crochet. I make the exact same misapprehensions in other areas of life.

The other thing that is funny is when people ask me how I have the patience to complete a project. I don’t need patience for the things I enjoy; I need patience for the things I don’t.

I get it though. Crochet is not instant gratification, at least not of the sort where you go shopping and have a Thing in your hand immediately. It’s a slow drip of gratification. Which is healthy for me, as I quite like instant gratification and I need to practice an alternative.

I have to say though, the internet has stimulated my recent increase in crochet, and that’s partly by increasing the instant gratification factor, thanks to Etsy. I avoid Ravelry, due to the social media aspect. But I love Etsy for finding patterns. Being able to instantly find high quality patterns has made me more excited about crocheting, and more likely to complete projects and move on to new ones. I am ok with this. I don’t mind spending a small amount of money to support other creators, who are women much like me making a little extra money on their small businesses. Not everything needs to be or should be free. And the patterns I buy are really wonderful and have been put together with such care. I would much rather pay for an excellent pattern than struggle with a poor one.

People also ask if I make up my own patterns, and the answer is yes I can, but it takes a different kind of energy. When I’m improvising I often have to re-do things that don’t quite work. Sometimes I’m in the mood for that, sometimes I’m not.

My latest project involves a pattern is from the wonderful Ukrainian designer Galina Veremeenko, and you can explore her work here. When I followed her pattern to the letter, this was the result:

I created this doll for a silent auction last January. She did her job of parting people from their money and has gone to her forever home with one of my lovely classmates. I thoroughly enjoyed this project and had a bit of separation anxiety when she was done, so I knew I wanted to create another doll.

So this spring I re-visited the pattern but did some modifying and improvising. I wanted the look to be reminiscent of the costumes our adult group wore this year for our repertoire dance.  See here for a photo of our costumes.

This is my hot rod:

I changed the embroidery on the blouse to resemble the flower embroidery on our peasant blouses, and I added crocheted lace to the collar and cuffs. I kept the poppy headdress as it is so beautiful and iconic and makes the doll immediately identifiable as Ukrainian.

To create the poyas (sash), I experimented with a six-strand braid. I made some mistakes but was happy with the result and decided to not be a perfectionist.

I couldn’t exactly recreate the floofy skirt and crinolines we wore with this texture of yarn. But, I added a lace trim to the petticoat.

The skirt happens to naturally curl up in the back, offering a peak at the lace and resembling how our skirts would fly during our dance, which is perfect.

I also added a bun in place of the braid on the original pattern

Now what’s in her basket?

This is all my invention. All of our dances this year involved something to do with baskets, either going to the market with a basket or taking presents to a wedding in a basket. So I had to give my doll a basket. In it are two items: a scarf and a bunch of radishes. Scarfs were featured prominently in the dances, and I had to practice throwing a scarf dramatically (not so easy haha). I created this mini-scarf from  a granny square template and just kept adding rows and alternating colours.

The “radishes” are a little pun on our group name: an in-joke only the ladies would fully get. I had a lot of fun figuring them out:

So, that’s my latest, and now I just have to figure a way to display her, which is still a conundrum. And last but not least, the name “Flora” was chosen by my eldest daughter. 

2024 depth sounding

Resisting the Machine: An interview with Peco Gaskovski - Jonathan Van Maren

Moving Mountains - Fr. Stephen Freeman

Our Godless Era is Dead - Paul Kingsnorth

Simple Acts of Sanity - A Seed Catalogue - Ruth Gaskovski and Peco

This were to be new-made when thou art old - Mary Harrington

Five thought-provoking articles I read lately: five points of view that I’m thinking about as I consider 2024. 

There are plenty of other interesting articles I could have showcased here of course, but these have stuck with me in part because I read them in this festive, but also restive, dark but also bright time of year. The Christmas meals and gift exchanges have come and gone, and now here I am with the gift of time.

It’s interesting to compare how I imagine this time of leisure will feel, versus how it actually feels. I imagine time without work schedules and activities will feel relaxing and peaceful, like putting down a heavy backpack and taking a long stretch. In reality, the absence of schedules and activities means unforeseen preoccupations bubble up. I have trouble sleeping. Anxiety suddenly attaches itself to…..almost anything. My body aches for no understandable reason. Until I learn to set a goal for each day, accomplish something myself and with the kids, it’s truly not very enjoyable at all. I have learned (but somehow also have to constantly re-learn) that every day needs to have some kind of a plot: a beginning, middle and end, and some sort of challenge or goal.

Anyway, I will challenge myself to pull a quote out of each article and link it to a thought or intention for the year. I haven’t thought a great deal about this, so I’m likely to surprise myself.  I’m going to publish this before it is complete, because then it’s easy to use my own links, and because I think it’s okay if it’s a work in progress.

A “traditioned” life is not a static existence. Instead, it is something of a co-existence. The givenness of life is allowed. The mountains get a vote (or even a veto). There are many “mountains” in our lives – it is an ever-present feature of a material existence. Our planet is “traditioned” in a very unique position. That position (and much else that has been given us) make life possible. Very slight changes to that position would make life (certainly human life) impossible. At some point in our future, the ravages of an ice age will return (and there will be nothing we can do about it).  —Fr. Stephen Freeman

My environment is full of the same kind of reminders that Fr. Freeman’s is. I am a fairly short drive away from the mountains, from wild areas that while not unmarked by people, are much more wild than civilized. But I also live in a city with many places that aren’t built to a human walking scale. So I’ve always been aware of this tension from my earliest years. My overriding feeling returning to a city as a child was that I was moving from something real to something less real.  As I got older I learned to also appreciate the beautiful things that people can create, especially by participating in something social. So that made the city more “real” to me.

But I still have a frequent desire to visit places where the schemes of humans are, if not completely absent (I’m not a wilderness survivalist!) then at least more humble. So for the new year, find ways to live with things how they are, not try to change them to fit a whim.

 ...if God thinks and feels and speaks—if God has something like a ‘mind’—then maybe to be fully human means exercising our own mental functions, and not enfeebling them through excessive device use. Or, if God is face-to-face relationship as a Trinity, then our real center is not within us, but within the other—in our real relationships. And if God made the earth, plants, and animals, then maybe being human means staying physically close to these things.  

All that might sound very basic, yet in all these areas—mind, relationship, nature, embodiment—the ‘Machine’ competes against God, by framing every part of reality as a biological mechanism or a simulation, to be manipulated according to our caprice. I think this is where the real battle is—a battle to answer the question, “What is reality?” 

But this is not a question for Christians alone. It matters to all of us, and I think we need to wrestle with it in our families, our schools, even in our politics. We’ll come up with varying answers, but what matters is that we’re left with a robust moral awareness of the dark side of technology. Without that, the only thing left to wake us up will be suffering.  --Peco Gaskovski

I would like to keep this question in my mind for the next year: "What is reality?" and "What does it mean to be human?" As I've noted before, questions tend to stick in my mind most effectively. I don't know all the answers to these questions, but I think they are good for framing decisions and conversations.

...if commitment comes with risks, the price of trying to avoid those risks is higher still. Committing to family life may be to risk abandonment. But the manosphere, and it female mirror-image ideology of Sex and the City liberal feminism, is a sterile, futile war not just on emotional risk but the inevitabilities that stand behind that risk: time, ageing, and death. The advice offered by these ideologies is far worse than risk-taking: to eschew all the long-term commitments that make life meaningful, in case the sight of your partner ageing normally reminds you of the passage of time. Grow old anyway, and leave no legacy of love to nourish the next generation. --Mary Harrington

This paragraph probably sums up the truth I would most like to pass on to my daughters. So many contemporary popular fictions (aka politics, belief systems, ideologies)  have an unspoken assumption: namely, that one can (and should) live forever the way that one (might) live in one's twenties. From one perspective, this might look like personal autonomy, or even eternal youth. But it is a terribly brittle mindset, implying that the only good things in life are the things we choose and the things we control. Change and loss come for all of us, however. Things we cannot control, both welcome and unwelcome, happen to all of us. Just based on my experience, however, the things we do not control are sometimes the very things we need. It seems to me that the sane way to live is invest some time in figuring out what and who is important, stick with it/them, and not try to bulldoze every mountain that stands in the way.

A feast without a fast is a strange, half-finished thing: this is something I’ve only learned recently. We are coming up to the greatest annual feast of all, the one that most people, whether Christian or not, are going to end up celebrating. I’ve celebrated Christmas all my life, mostly with no religious trappings, and I’ve always loved it — more so since I became a father. But Christmas, in historical terms, is only one of a number of great feasts that make up the Christian ritual year, which was once — and still is in those parts of the world which continue to take it seriously — studded with saints days, festivals, processions, and feasts. --Paul Kingsnorth

There are so may paragraphs in Paul's essay I could have showcased. But I chose this one because the fast/feast rhythm is something I've been thinking about the past while. I observe how important holidays are when I see how my children feel about them. Christmas, Easter, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Halloween, birthdays: as soon as one holiday come to an end, they start looking toward the next one and talking about how to prepare for it. Of course they look forward to treats/gifts associated with these holidays, but that's not the only thing: holidays structure their year, as do things like the school calendar now that they are in school, and the various performances and festivals that they participate in through their dance program. I also observe the importance of making holidays about something more than just treats and gifts. If the focus is only on gifts, they get increasingly dissatisfied with them. After all, once the gift is opened, the mystery is over....and maybe it's a let down. So, I find myself trying to re-ritualize. This year, before they opened Advent goodies, I asked the girls to tell me one thing they were grateful for. Once they go used to this routine, they really enjoyed this. And it also seemed to help them appreciate the small gift they received, rather than complaining about it or immediately moving on to the next shiny anticipate things (which has a tendency to happen).

This is a long way from a fast, admittedly, but I think it's a step in that direction: bringing some mindfulness to the moment in a small way. I would like to keep looking for ways to do this in the new year.

My last featured article is Ruth and Peco Gaskovski's list of anachronistic practices compiled from an informal survey of their readers. They categorized them as follows:

• Technology use (reducing, altering, removing, replacing)
• Self-sufficient, minimalist practices
• Embodied & mental practices
• Children and family
• Spiritual and relational practices

I enjoyed reading (and contributing) to the list because it is a reminder that we do have choices in how we interact with each other and with, or without, technology. There are a few of the listed practices I already do, most of the time or some of the time. Perhaps there are some I would like to try or try more often. I don't know. It's not a proscriptive list; rather it's again about bringing mindfulness to daily routines, and asking that question "What is reality?" I find it interesting as a reminder that, oh yes, there are people who think about these things and people who have found these practices helpful. Any sort of intention has to be grounded in reality, in the things that we do.

So that's where I'm at. This isn't a list of "resolutions". It's more an effort to name the kind of music I am listening for as I walk through the market, or the meadow, or wherever I am at the moment. I guess one thing I can admit is I don't feel clever enough to decide on or specify exactly what I think would make my life better. It's pretty good as it is, with more than enough daily triumphs and challenges to keep me busy, way more than I can write about here. Also I'm never in the mood to create a long to-do list in January, which still feels like hibernation time.

But change and new growth often begins quietly, subtly, privately and that suits this time of year. I look forward to "growing" these ideas this year.

Completed between December 28th 2023 and January 6th, 2024

Photos of dancers, and other fragments

 I spend a lot of time thinking about getting older these days.

I don't mean I have anything profound to say about it. Nor do I exactly sit down and dedicate time to thinking about getting older. Rather, as I go about my day, I find scenes from my past flitting across my memory. Something - an artifact, a photo, a phrase, a seen or remembered place - suddenly conjures up a memory. The content of the memories is not necessarily compelling, rather something of the atmosphere in which the memory was made.

For example, this year, as Christmas approaches, I often find myself remembering leaving my university after classes to go Christmas shopping. I would walk to the nearest mall, then ride the bus back after making my purchases. I remember watching the sunset through the windows of the bus. It is the ordinariness of the memory that makes it unforgettable.

Currently I'm re-reading (after a period of quite a few years) Jennifer Homans' Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet. The first time I read this book, I was pleasantly startled by the nostalgia I felt. It's the same reading it now. I was never a professional ballet dancer, or anything resembling one. And yet there is something so familiar about the people, the values, and especially the "scene" Homans describes. It brings to mind a kind of shabby-elite aesthetic. Daydreams lived out in bargain-renovated studios. The secret glamour of tulle and sequins hiding in a garment bag. When I was growing up dress-up clothes were in short supply. My daughters have had piles of floofy dresses from the time they were toddlers, but I only glimpsed such things occasionally. I wasn't even allowed to wear the tutu my mother made me except on parent viewing days. I have always associated the arts with genteel poverty. Musty rooms, scratched hardwood, lumpy linoleum, dusty curtains, old photographs on the walls. And yet there is nothing at all sad or pitiable about such memories. Maybe a kind of glorious sadness.

Today, I admit I don't try very hard to save money on my daughters' dance clothes because I crave the magical feeling of going to the dance store. When I was child, we would buy ballet shoes and uniforms at Classique Dancewear. They closed permanently a few years ago, hence my melancholy pleasure at typing out the full name. I clearly remember walking down the stairs to the store in the basement. Beautiful high-heeled ballroom shoes sparkled in glass cases. Mannequins modeled pancake tutus, the kind I knew I would never wear, because my mother could not get the tulle to stick out like that on my homemade tutus, no matter how hard she tried. And sequins, sequins in all colours sparkling everywhere. I never got to indulge in such frou-frou, however. My mother bought the Royal Ballet standard leotard and tights, and of course, new ballet slippers. The ballet slippers came (as they still do) in a flat cardboard box, one of many stacked on the shelf. I thought of this when I read (and viewed) the scene in Harry Potter where Harry buys his wand. The store where I shop for my daughters is welcoming, brightly lit, and very pink. Classique Dancewear on the other hand was Diagon Alley-meets-Moulin Rouge.

I fell in love with ballet after seeing a performance of Swan Lake. My first ballet classes were not at all like Swan Lake, however. They were in a run down, industrial part of the downtown. Maybe it was an artsy-fartsy, bohemian neighbourhood, but I didn't know what that was at the time. I just knew it was a bit scary to go to ballet. My mother would park near the railway station and then we would run across half a dozen railway lines to get to the studio, sometimes in front of an approaching train. I think we'd get arrested now for doing that. Later, maybe to avoid that maneuver, she would drop me off near the studio and I'd have to walk a block or two by myself downtown. I was coached in this and I affected an determined, severe look and manner so no questionable people would think of molesting me. (It worked, apparently).

My first ballet teacher was also a bit scary. I never even knew her name as a child, because we didn't use her name, we called her "Madame." She was old at the time, and most of the active teaching was done by younger women under her direction. But I do remember her once leading us at the barre, with a cigarette dangling from her red lips. She always smelled of cigarette smoke. At the end of class, we had to queue up and give her a hug and a kiss. I dreaded this because I had to smell her, but I wouldn't have dreamed of refusing. I just learned to hold my breath very discreetly.  My father never learned to like or trust Madame. He detested her smoking habit as much as I did, and unlike me had no qualms about expressing said dislike. Most devastatingly, he forbade me from taking part in the school recital. I don't really know why, but it involved (of course) a lot of extra rehearsals and maybe he thought this offered Madame too many opportunities for instruction of a dubious nature. Madame was not happy, and on one occasion even tried to trick me into staying for rehearsal. To no avail. My stage debut would have to wait for more years and another teacher. But I was not entirely sad in the end, because I got to join a more advanced class and ended up ahead of all my same-age peers.

I was perusing Glenbow Museum's "Mavericks" exhibit some years ago, and to my amused surprise, immediately recognized "Madame" from one of the biographies. "Mavericks" may have itself been regulated to history, although there is still a website with a few working links. But thanks to the project I found out my ballet teacher's name: Regina Cheremeteff. And so I can search the internet for her part in history, and a little part of mine.

Her biography:

Regina Bickel, 1912-1992, was born in Berlin, Germany on March 25, 1912. She toured Europe as a child ballerina under the stage name Regina Royce. She also worked as the director of an Italian company. In 1930 she married Count Michael Cheremeteff, ca. 1900-1943, and worked in his equestrian troupe based in Berlin. They had three children, Christina (Olso), Alexandra (Madsen),1933-2002, and Dmitry. She settled in Calgary, Alberta in 1956 and established the Calgary Russian Ballet School, of which she was director, choreographer and teacher until its closing in 1989. She died in Calgary on March 5, 1992 at the age of 79. Alberta Record

YMCA Calgary backs up my memories:

Her students called her “Madame” over the 30-plus years that she trained young ballet dancers in Calgary from the 1950s to the late 80s. ...As a child ballerina Regina Cheremeteff toured Europe en pointe, surviving two world wars before immigrating to Canada and moving to Calgary in 1956, where she established the Calgary Russian Ballet School. Not above trading her tutu for a tool-belt, Regina remodeled her dance studio herself, knocking out walls and tearing up floors.

Allan Cozzubbo Academy of Dance notes:

In 1963 she opened her downtown location on 8th Ave. SW. The school closed in 1989. in 1930 she had married Count Michael Cheremeteff (1900=1943) and worked in his Equestrian Troupe in Berlin. Her three Children are Christine-Alexandra and Dmitry --he became a professional ballet dancer and was a guest at her recital.  

Some additional digging, however, turned up an 1980 Calgary Herald story on Madame. I would recommend this for anyone who wants to know more about her than my few childhood memories can provide. I have retyped it to the best of my ability here, as the scanned article I found is unedited and mixed in with a hilariously dull article on Canadian constitutional politics. Incidentally however, both articles illustrate how much higher quality journalism was 40 odd years ago.

Perhaps most unnervingly, there is a gallery of photos in The University of Calgary's digital archives.

This picture is from 1986, and I'm pretty certain it depicts part of the performance that I was not allowed to participate in. If I had taken part in that recital, I could have been in this photo or a similar one. That's just freaky. Since about 2000, I have gotten used to brilliant colour digital photos that never age. By contrast, this picture and the others in the gallery look absurdly old.

Maybe my favourite photo is this one, however:

It's not the dancers my eye is drawn to here. This photo is also from the 80s, but these young women are older than I was then, although not really that much older, either. But what I like to look at is the barre and walls of the studio beside the posing dancers, because they look exactly as I remember them, though in black and white. I can almost feel that barre in my hand. The top one was close to eye level when I was youngest. The photos on the walls are all of Madame at various ages, in various costumes. I remember yellowed newspaper articles too. I'm not sure why all the archive photos are black and white, since colour photography was definitely invented in the 80s! Perhaps it was supposed to give the photos a timeless, glamourous feel. If so I don't think it worked: there is a campy nostalgia to the photos: All the dancers look like amateurs trying really hard. I don't mean that as a bad thing: it makes them all the more relatable. There is a grounding grittiness behind the fantasy. In the end - for me at least - that was a more lasting impression of ballet than professional perfection.

I clipped this photo for the sake of the young woman kneeling right in front:

I'm pretty sure that she is Miss Mimi, who was one of the younger teachers whom I best remember. Up till this week, Miss Mimi’s identity was as lost in my incomplete memories as Madame’s. But thanks to my digging this week, I realized she is Mimi Haeseker, and she has been “Miss Mimi” to generations of dancers. How awesome is that. And I also remembered she was (is?) a talented artist who painted ballerina bunny rabbits. I could get addicted to this amateur archive hunting.

All this trip down memory lane, and the urge to somehow preserve it here, before the traces disappear further, was brought to mind my Jennifer Homans' description of the diaspora of Russian ballet dancers and teachers in the States in between the World Wars. Anna Pavlova toured the Vaudeville circuit as "'Pavlova the Incomparable": [appearing] alongside minstrel shows, baseball-playing elephants, and other popular acts. If the theatrical fare tended toward the light, however, Pavlova and her audiences had no doubt about the seriousness of her art. Her natural charisma and ardent commitment left a powerful impression on an entire generation of American and European dancers." Madame would surely have been one of those who watched and learned. Homans continues:

"Pavlova was the most famous, but there were dozens of Russians like her: they toured America in various Ballet Russes spin-off troups between the wars (some carried on into the 60s) introducing - and converting - several generations of audiences to classical dance. (page 450) ...... "When they were too old or tired to perform, many of those dancers opened schools: they fanned out and set down roots in cities and towns across the country. .... Performance by performance, class by class, over many years, these itinerant Russians passed on their tradition. Not only steps and techniques: they brought to their lessons the entire Imperial orthodoxy of Russian ballet, and it was in their sweaty encounters with students that the long process of transplanting ballet to American minds and bodies began. (451)

Although Madame was German (married to a Russian) she branded her school as "Russian Ballet," and I see her as the heir of those Russian teachers, albeit about a generation younger. And I particularly like the description of how ballet becomes absorbed into dancers' minds and bodies. There's something grounding for me in reading Homan's book, and reading about Madame's life. Even if my cultural inheritance is fragmentary, those fragments still come from somewhere. I am the inheritor of something; I don't just exist alone, attempting to make it all up.